Seth is a business intelligence and decision systems expert. He is founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit and principal consultant at Washington, D.C., based Alta Plana Corporation. Seth consults, writes, and speaks on information-systems strategy, data management and analysis systems, IT industry trends, and emerging analytical technologies. Seth chairs the Sentiment Analysis Symposium and the Text Analytics Summit.

Covering text analytics software, market, conference, and other news and developments to help readers better understand advances in Knowledge Discovery in Text...

Software

Attensity has released a new version of its Voice of the Customer product, Analyze for VOC Version 5.2, that includes accuracy enhancements, a new sentiment scoring feature, a RESTful real-time integration architecture, and analysis enhancements include normalized time-series charts and calculated values according to the company. Version 5.2 introduces new out-of-the box reports for sentiment, Net Promoter Score (NPS) issues, customer churn and competition, according to Attensity.

Attensity has also released E-Service Version 6.1, an enhanced version of the company's application suite for customer service and support organizations.

Clarabridge launched Clarabridge Social Media Analysis (SMA), which the company characterizes as "the industry's first advanced text analytics software that allows companies to integrate social media content into their existing internal enterprise feedback to create more useful customer analysis," in September. The solution uses social media content from Alterian Techrigy's warehouse of social media content, with data from blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, MySpace, and other social media sites.

Linguamatics released I2E 3.1 in October. According to the company, key enhancements include support for enterprise deployment, NLP-based querying of a greater choice of document types, a new I2E Chemistry option with substructure and structure similarity search powered by ChemAxon, extended results reporting, flexible hyperlinking from extracted entities to web resources such as gene identifiers, glossaries of biomedical terms, and chemical structure visualization.

Orchestr8, a developer of semantic tagging and text mining software, in September announced a new technology to complement their content analysis service, AlchemyAPI. Visual Constraints is designed for extraction of structured data (product info, pricing, descriptions, etc.) from Web pages. A new, October AlchemyAPI release extends extraction capabilities to quotations and named-entity coreferences.

Resources

The UK National Centre for Text Mining has posted presentation slides from the October workshop on Text Mining for Scholarly Communications and Repositories.

An e-book by Graham Wilcock of the University of Helsinki, "Introduction to Linguistic Annotation and Text Analytics," according publisher Morgan & Claypool, "provides a basic introduction to both fields, and aims to show that good linguistic annotations are the essential foundation for good text analytics."

Conferences

Text Analysis Conference (TAC 2009) workshops will be held November 16-17, 2009 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Maryland, co-located with the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC), November 17-20, 2009.

A May 1, 2010 workshop on text mining will be held in Columbus, Ohio in conjunction with the 2010 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining (SDM 2010). The workshop is devoted to techniques of machine learning in conjunction with natural language processing, information extraction and algebraic/mathematical approaches to computational information retrieval.

The 1st Information Retrieval Facility Conference is slated for May 31, 2010 in Vienna, followed by the 3rd IRF Symposium, June 1-4 2010. The conference aims to provides a forum for researchers in information retrieval, Semantic Web technologies for IR, Natural language processing for IR, and large-scale or distributed computing for those areas. They symposium will especially focus on methodology and evaluation in patent searching and retrieval.

The North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Human Language Technologies (NAACL HLT) 2010 conference will take place June 1-6, 2010 in Los Angeles, California. The conference covers a broad spectrum of disciplines working towards enabling intelligent systems to interact with humans using natural language, and towards enhancing human-human communication through services such as speech recognition, automatic translation, information retrieval, text summarization, and information extraction.

The 48th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2010) will be held in Uppsala, July 11-16, 2010. The ACL workshops will be held July 15-16.

The 33rd annual ACM SIGIR Conference is slated for 18-23 July 2010, Geneva, Switzerland. SIGIR is the major international forum for the presentation of new research results and for the demonstration of new systems and techniques in the broad field of information retrieval (IR).

The 23rd International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2010) will be held in Beijing, August 23-27, 2010. There will be pre-conference workshops on August 21-22 and post-conference workshops on August 28.